"Improvisation and anti-establishment, that's what I love." Lauren Gauge interviews former stage director at the Royal Albert Hall, Ed Cottrell on his show Freedom To Be Me

One of the fascinating, longstanding charms of the theatre industry is the business of show business, the glamour and the people that you meet along the way. One man who has experienced show business throughout the years is Ed Cottrell, former Stage Director at the Royal Albert Hall who is about to direct and perform in an improvised production Freedom To Be Me. “I worked with Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and Eric Clapton, you name them I’ve worked with them!”

If variety is the spice of life then play is the key to creation. Freedom To Be Me is a playful sketch show created with original music devised by the company focusing on the struggles of men and women to be taken seriously despite sexism, exploitation and prejudices against them.

During the years 1982-89 Cottrell was responsible for the safety for everybody in the building of the Royal Albert Hall. “The area of work was incredible. It went from tennis to boxing and originally we did the gymnastics too. Until the gymnasts got so skilled they needed a larger run up than what our building could offer.”

Be Your Theatre (BYT) group ran the entire time Cottrell worked at the Royal Albert Hall and is the group that will perform Freedom To Be Me at the Etcetera Theatre. As part of Cottrell's contract he had Thursdays off so he could run the theatre group. Cottrell comments: “I have run a workshop on Thursday evenings for 47 years that is entirely devoted to improvisation”. Originally a young people’s theatre group BYT became a group for all ages Cottrell says, “we have had people of all different ages including one woman who started when she was 81 and ended when she was 89.”

Of all the stage legends that you have worked with, who sticks out in your mind the most? Cottrell replies “Ella Fitzegerald, because she was such a grandmother. The dressing room was full of kids. I would knock on the door and say we’re on in a few minutes, and she would kiss everybody goodbye, take her glasses off and put them in my pocket, walk on stage, the spotlight would hit her like angel and at the end of the set she would come off and ask, are you there Ed? Are you there Ed? Put her hand in my pocket to get her glasses back out and she would take hold of my hand as I walked her back down to the dressing room and she would say, hello darlings, how are you? Unbelievable. She was a wonderful creature, no pretentions at all, just a genius.”

Adding to his impressive collaborators, Cottrell now works with people from far beyond the Royal Albert Hall and Richmond where BYT originated, his collaborators are from all over the globe. Cottrell says, “the three women on the poster represent three different continents”. He has also represented the UK with work at the Cairo International Festival of Experimental Theatre.

Each performer brings their experiences to Freedom To Be Me? in different ways. Cottrell relays, “we did a workshop on Taiwan recently, they may well bring something from their background into the play that we touched on in that workshop. It depends on the stimulus as that will set us off in one direction or another.” Audiences are invited to bring or give a stimulus to the performers during the show by way of props. Having workshopped together for many months the collective is tight and ready for their improvised play.

However, an improvised play about prejudice doesn’t pop up often, so why now? “The concept of prejudice isn’t relevant to now, except for the fact that it is relevant to all time, because unfortunately we haven’t moved on much and prejudices are constant. The concept originated from women I was working with at the time. Including an African, Asian and European woman.” Cottrell adds, “one of the performers, Winnie, said in this week’s workshop that she hadn’t realised that being gay was illegal in Ghana – you get locked up. So that is a source of material likely to arise as a result of that improvisation. These are all classic examples of prejudice. Equally, Winnie has a fantastic Ghanaian accent that she can switch on and off. We are likely to bring elements of our experiences in all manner of ways like that!”

Cottrell's love of improvisation came about from his training. He recalls, “when we left college we set up an underground theatre group, which eventually became experimental. It was a lot of swearing, a lot of taking your clothes off and a lot of genuine anti-establishment stuff.” He declares: “I love doing that. That work was all worked up through improvisation” and from then on Cottrell proved improvisation techniques worked by making successful shows at BYT, and the company are absolutely pumped and excited to bring this energetic show to audiences in Camden when they open in September. Cottrell continues: “there are proven processes that we use so that there is a form and structure to each bit of the work even if we don’t know what we’re going to say or what the subject matter might be.”

The show will be conducted by ED COTTRELL with WINNIE ARHIN, POLLY CHIU and NINA SCHLAUTMANN with the addition of other members of the workshop collective.
Bring your own prop to challenge the performers!